ANAMNESIS

 

Anamnesis
Gideon Emmanuel

 

Here in a switchblade of silence 

a child flutters in nakedness like brown leaves between anger & forgiveness,

a cockpit too heavy to drive his fate

in a railroad where memory is a drunk driver.

 

He's imagined being seen in the night beams

In the hidden shadows & shades of guilt,

Like to say “mother, the sun comes, 

I'll go into hiding to avoid being burnt a second time”. 

 

I've observed the slavery of forgetfulness lashed with the stings of bonding in his voice.  How the heart never breaks down like a black box even when the body is extinct.

 

Let's pretend that time is why there is no

distinction between life & death when we sleep. Last poem I wrote about a friend who I met in the market selling fruits, unaware 

that his mother, already sick at noon, 

hung herself to the ceiling because her son

had planted fireballs of un-forgiveness 

in his heart & how maybe they flared up in her & now a slight hunger for grief & change sprouts lately in him.

 

Too sad, alas, guilt visits the body  as if a feast 

of honey infested scars.

 

Gideon Emmanuel(he /him) is a young poet, teacher, lover of kids/nature, orphans & depressed people, from Lagos, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Eboquills, U_Rights magazine, Arthut anthology,Boardspeck, Street Child anthology, and are forthcoming in Fiery Scribe Review & Terror House.

FB: Ubaha Gideon Emmanuel.